


The Shores of Sleep

by bottlecapmermaid



Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: Alternate Universe - 20th Century, Discussion of Depression, Graphic Description of Writer's Block, M/M, Mental Health Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 20:50:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21259454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bottlecapmermaid/pseuds/bottlecapmermaid
Summary: Stuck with intractable writer's block, Lavi goes away to the coast for his health and  the health of his writing.





	1. The Quiet

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for Laven Week 2015. This work contains frank discussion of the POV character's depression, and its effects on his life. This fic is incomplete, but is finished and unlikely to update.

He gets sick, sort of, and it doesn’t go away. First he sleeps all the time, and then he can’t sleep at all. He gets distractible, can’t pay attention, barely writes. He goes through pots and pots of coffee a day, and barely writes a page. The words he doesn’t write, can’t write, haunt him and skitter along the inside of his skull. Write, Lavi, he tells himself, just write, the words are right there. But he can’t write, and he gets sicker and sicker and the city gets louder and louder. He has to leave.

He talks to his editor, explains that he’s going away for his health, and assures her he has a new idea for a novel. He does not have a new idea for a novel. It is a lie. He has no ideas, no idea what to do with himself, no idea what to write, not even much of an idea of what he hopes to accomplish by going away. Fresh air is what he needs, fresh air and to get away from the constant noise of the city. In the summer of 1954, Lavi Bookman leaves for the far-away seaside.

"It’s a bit rustic,“ the landlord says. His voice is tinny and distant over the telephone. This call will not be a cheap one, but that’s why Lavi is calling from his office. They’ll pick up the fee. "There’s no electricity and no running water. Good fireplace, though, and it’s not far from town. You can see the ocean from the kitchen window.”

"It sounds perfect," Lavi says mostly honestly.

He packs enough clothes, books, paper, and ink for a month. When a month is up, he can decide if he wants to stay longer or come back to the city. The trip is long and dull, train after bus after train after bus. The city gives way to shale rock faces, and then to pine forests. The pine forests get denser and the towns get thinner, until the busses stop and he has to hire a very confused taxi driver.

"It’ll not be cheap getting out to that island,” the driver says, trying to dissuade Lavi.

He shrugs. “I don’t have a car. I’ll make it worth it, I promise.”

"At least you don’t have to take a ferry anymore. They put a bridge in about twenty-five years ago. People still call it the new bridge.“

The ride is three silent hours over twisting, hilly, winter-ravaged roads, and the cost is indeed exorbitant. After a few wrong turns down unmarked dirt roads, they find the house. Lavi pays the driver twice what he charges, and hefts his suitcases up the few stairs to the red-painted door. The door sticks even after he gets it unlocked, but a little shoving gets it open. The sun hasn’t set yet, and the air smells like pine and salt. He drags his suitcases into the main bedroom, and falls onto the bed. For an activity composed primarily of sitting, traveling is exhausting.

The house is tiny, only a few rooms, and what isn’t made of wood is made of windows. Huge picture windows look out from the central living area, late afternoon sunlight streaming in over the floor and furniture. A small path leads down to the beach, hidden under high tide at the moment. The light blazes off the water, almost too bright for him to look at. If his mind wanders, he could almost believe he could walk across the path of shifting, glittering light and water.

He unpacks his typewriter and sets it up on a small table looking out over the water. Everything else can wait. This is what he came out here to do: to write, to be alone with his thoughts and to put them on paper.

He stares at the pristine, blank page. It stares back. Lavi is losing a stare down with a piece of flattened tree pulp. He cannot write. He will never have another salient idea, and he will never write again. This is the end of his career.

"We are not finished here,” he says to the typewriter. It is resolutely silent. Damn its silence.

It’s too late to try walking into town, and anyway he’s too tired to even think of it. Lavi makes dinner out of some bread and cheese he’d stashed in a bag in case of sudden hunger. The sunset over the water is blinding, so many shades of fuschia it strains his good eye. He watches it shift lower and lower in the sky, until it leaves him and his tiny house in darkness. He lights a candle and wanders back to his room, only knocking into walls twice. He undresses in the near dark and blows the candle out from under the blankets. The island breathes around him, the sea sighing with every wave, the trees whispering secrets to each other in the wind. For the first time in months, he sleeps without trouble.

The light wakes him, cool and astonishingly clear, a delicate yellow on the white of his bedsheets. When he checks his watch, it is a quarter to four. He does not mind, and watches the light in fascination. Lavi has not seen a proper sunrise in years upon years; in the city the sky just shifts from gray to lighter gray, but the colors of the light here are like a painter’s palette.

He finds half a bag of coffee, and takes a chance at boiling it over the fire in the grate. It comes out fiercely bitter and strong, with enough grounds to leave him rinsing his mouth for minutes after drinking it, but it does its job.

The walk into town for groceries isn’t as long as he had feared, although the road is narrow and winding and the mosquitoes are thick as fog. He comes home with food and about eighty-seven mosquito bites. Lunch is apples and bread and staring down at his typewriter and its damnably blank paper. After two hours, the view of the water is too tempting. The tide is low and the sand looks soft and warm, even with seaweed strewn about the tide line.

Lavi sees no other footprints in the sand. He must be well and truly alone here. He does not mind. The quiet is a good change from the rush and incessant rumble of the city. He rolls up the cuffs of his slacks and leaves his sweater and shoes on a rock where the sand and water won’t get them. The dry sand tickles between his toes and blue mussel shells crunch when he steps on them.

The water gets him while he’s not paying attention; he stands too close to it, and an ambitious wave sweeps over his feet. The cold is so sharp and sudden as to be painful, and he lets out an undignified yelp. How could water be so cold on such a hot, bright day? He scurries back to the safety of the dry rocks and buries his toes in the warm sand.

Watching the water, he tries to describe it to himself. What words would he use to tell someone who had never seen the sea what it’s like? Which would he use to portray it in a book? The water is not precisely blue or green, more a dark teal, and nearly opaque with salt. The sand is a delicate, soft brown, occasionally flecked with the blue of crushed mussel shells. The rocks above the tide line are rough pink granite, the ones below are stained black and brown, white barnacles collecting in heaps and growths. The ocean swishes inexorably closer.

He is alone, but blissfully so. It has been hours since he spoke to another human being. Most of the time Lavi considers himself fairly chatty, but resting his voice is much more pleasant than he would have expected. He can order his words more slowly and carefully now. Now there is no rush to slap down whatever comes into his head; he can rest and let his mind rest, let his words rest.

So it’s when he turns around to look for the trail back to the house that he gets the shock of his life. A ghost is standing on the rocks near the tree line, dressed in white from top to toe. Even his hair is white, matching the sling cradling his left arm to his chest and the bandages covering almost half his face. The ghost startles a little when Lavi yelps and stumbles back, swearing.

"Holy shit, how long have you been–“

"I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten–”

They speak at the same time, and then fall silent, each gesturing for the other to speak. Finally, Lavi decides to break the silence.

"Are you a ghost?“

The possible ghost glances around. "Me? No, no I’m quite alive.” His words are more confident than his tone. “I’m just… I suppose my clothes are unconventional, yes.”

"I didn’t know anyone else lived around here.“ The landlord hadn’t mentioned any neighbors, although Lavi also hadn’t asked about them.

"I’m taking care of my uncle’s house for the summer.” The not-ghost definitely-alive-flesh-and-blood boy gestures awkwardly at himself. “Recovering from… an accident.”

"I’m sorry to hear that,“ Lavi says automatically.

"Thank you.” The boy smiles, and it almost reaches his pale grey eyes. His gaze never quite focuses on anything, as if he can’t believe it’s all real and present. “Are you here on vacation, or are you my uncle’s new neighbor?”

"Just vacationing. I may stay the whole summer here, though. It’s restful.“ He does not mention the bone-deep exhaustion, or the cruel fever-like dreams that follow him.

"Summer isn’t long here.” The boy carefully lowers himself to sit on the rock, flinching when his arm shifts in the sling. Lavi does not know if he should help. “But I think it’s the more beautiful for it.”

"I realized I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Lavi Bookman.“ He sits, and holds out his hand.

"Allen Walker,” the boy says. His good hand, when it touches Lavi’s, is desperately cold despite having been on the sun-baked rock a moment before. “It’s good to meet you; it gets lonely out here sometimes.”

"Do you live alone?“ He can’t imagine that Allen does everything by himself with one arm and one eye out of commission–or so he assumes; the extent of Allen’s injuries is unclear under the bandages.

"Oh no, I have a dog, Tim. He’s around here somewhere.”

It’s not the answer Lavi expected. Does he cook and clean and do everything with just one arm? At least it’s his left arm that’s in the sling, he could never operate with only his non-dominant hand. “Would you like to come over for dinner sometime?” Lavi hears his own voice ask.

Allen’s mouth drops open in surprise. “I–that’s very generous of you,” he says. “I should warn you, I eat a lot.”

"And I should warn you that I’m not a very practiced cook, so you may not want to eat much.“

Allen laughs, and at that moment Lavi starts to feel a story scratching at his brain. He only sees a little of it, just patches, like the ground under heavy winter snowfall: a graveyard, a little ghost perched on a headstone, a ragdoll, bare feet worn bloody by ceaseless wandering. He’ll have to dig it out by writing, but he knows how to do that. This is the feeling he missed, the feeling of needing to tell a story for its own sake, not just to publish something and collect the royalties. This is what he went away to find.

"I have to go,” Lavi says, lurching to his feet. He needs his paper and pen, now, or he’ll start writing in blood. He can’t let this one slip away, not after so long, not when it could be so good. Writing isn’t his job, it’s a compulsion, an obsession. He would do it for free, but supporting himself doing other things would cut into his time to write. He had to go now.

"Dinner on Wednesday?“ Allen calls after him, faintly bemused.

"Yes, yes, of course, perfect,” Lavi says, already working on opening lines.


	2. The Silence

People say it’s cooler here in the summers, but Lavi has yet to see any real evidence. Certainly it’s not the sucking humidity and metal-and-concrete stink of city heat, but here the air is all salt and pine. Sea salt dries his hands, and sweat makes them slick. His pen slips if he’s not careful, leaving black slashes across white paper, sometimes even all the way through. Shoes, even sandals, stop being of much use to him; he doesn’t care for his feet sweating into shoes, and going anything but barefoot on the beach is foolish.

Perhaps it is the huge windows that make it feel so hot, or maybe it’s the blaze and glare of the sun off the water. Lavi stops spending much time inside, in the stagnant, dusty air of his small home, and takes to writing with pen and paper instead of his obstinate typewriter. It stays crouched on his table, a mechanical gargoyle.

Writing by hand takes time, forces him to think, actually decide which words to use, rather than letting his fingers scuttle over the keys of his typewriter. It’s slower, quieter, and somehow less annoying. Time is at a premium in the city and at work, but here next to the water, with his feet in the sand and the sun gazing down with its singular eye, it doesn’t mean as much. Days are long, nights are short. Hours blend together, waves wash away minutes. Seconds are only an afterthought. The elasticity of time here makes writing easier; he doesn’t worry about how many words he cranks out in an hour, all that matters is that he has them again.

Writing by hand also brings back the familiar cramping in his hand and arm and even his neck. He finds himself hunched over his work to keep a shadow over the paper so it doesn’t sear his eyes any more than he can avoid.

Familiar ink stains build up on his hand. For all its convenience and simplicity, the ballpoint pen still smears when his hand sweats either from heat or nerves or intensity of work. At first he tries to fight the stains, scrubbing at the blue shadows ingrained in his fingers, but after a while he gives up and accepts it. He’s had inky hands before, it won’t kill him.

He takes breaks when Allen shows up, always in white, bandages always fresh. Sometimes they talk, sometimes not. It turns out that Lavi is a passable chef, and Allen a very willing taste tester. He can also put away nearly a full kitchen’s worth of food. Soon they spend nearly every evening together. Allen knows something like a hundred versions of solitaire, and he plays or teaches Lavi in the light of the shrinking white candles.

Allen doesn’t ask what Lavi is writing, and Lavi doesn’t volunteer anything. He can’t find it in himself to stop and try to explain; he needs to write and then maybe he can explain himself when he’s done. Or that’s what he tells himself. He suspects, late at night when sentences and particles buzz in his skull like bees, that he does not know what he’s writing or why he’s writing is. Or perhaps the work will explain itself, which would be the ideal. All he needs do is sit back and let the story work its way out of his hands and onto whatever paper he happens to see. Let the work speak for itself, without him as a conduit.

Similarly, he doesn’t ask about Allen’s injuries, much though he wonders how he changes his wrappings and cleans his wounds with only one hand. But he doesn’t want to alienate Allen or push him away, and so he keeps his silence.

“What do you usually write?” Allen asks, after a long sunny stretch of quiet. He holds a mussel shell in his hand, the blue starkly contrasting against his skin, peering at the mother of pearl inside.

“I write for a newspaper.”

“Really? I’d have thought you were an author.”

Lavi finally looks up from his paper. “I am.”

“I meant more that you seem like you should write fiction.” Sometimes Allen seems to have trouble getting his meaning to fit his words, as if he thinks and speaks at cross purposes.

“I’m a theater critic. I go to plays and then write about it so other people can read what I said and then parrot that instead of having their own opinion.”

“Do you like it?”

“I like the theater.”

Allen takes his time replying. “But you don’t like the people who read your columns.”

“I don’t like people assuming that my opinion is the right one. I might have a bad night and give a play a bad review, one of the actors might not have much experience and flub a line, lots of things go into what a write, and not all of them are objective. I’m basically getting paid to publish my yea or nay on a play because I’m the one that’ll write a piece about it, not because I know any better than anyone else.”

“Would you really like to be perfectly objective?” A delicate undercurrent of discomfort or concern trickles along Allen’s words.

The honesty of the question catches Lavi off guard, off kilter. People don’t ask him questions like that, because that isn’t how reporting works, it’s not how humans work. “I… don’t know. Being objective would probably help me give a better assessment of the writing and acting, but you can’t be objective about art, much as I may want to. It would be interesting, I guess.”

Being questioned by Allen is sort of like being questioned by a cat: quiet, and terribly on the nose in ways you didn’t even think of. Nothing in his words is malicious or harmful but he asks them in a sideways way, getting at things Lavi hasn’t fully and consciously examined.

“What about you?” Lavi asks. “What do you do?”

“I’m with a circus,” Allen replies immediately. “Or I was, I’m not certain they’ll want me back.”

“You’re a carnie?” Lavi blurts, staring at Allen. “You don’t look like one–I mean, sorry, I’ve never actually met any circus people outside of a circus–” He cuts himself off before he can shove his foot any farther into his mouth, but he fears the damage is done.

If he’s offended, Allen doesn’t show it. His smile is the same as ever, half of his face showing from under the gauze, no teeth visible, and his one eye crinkling a little. If anything, he’s mildly amused by Lavi’s exclamation, as if it’s one he gets regularly. “Not obviously freakish enough?”

“No, that’s not what I meant.” It was sort of what he meant. He can’t help it if his mind jumps immediately to sideshows when he hears about a circus.

“It’s all right, I haven’t worked with them in a while. I’ve been traveling with my uncle lately. I was a clown; I juggled and did balancing acts and card tricks, nothing too wild,” Allen says, answering Lavi’s unasked question.

“I haven’t been to the circus in a long time.” The ghost of the scent of caramel and sweat twists through the salt and sap of the sea and trees. Lavi hasn’t had cause to go to the circus since he was a child; it always took too much time, he was busy, he wanted to work, he didn’t have money… He does not make these excuses to Allen, who likely doesn’t care. Why should he? Plenty of other people go to the circus, and it’s not as if Allen’s troupe definitely came to the city. Such apologies are useless and would only serve to drape another leaden layer of guilt across his shoulders.

“It was time for me to move on.”

Allen’s voice is soft, not addressing anyone, perhaps not even himself. It feels politest not to acknowledge the remark, so Lavi turns back to his writing. “How did your uncle come to have this place?”

“I don’t really know. He’s a priest, but his services are required all over the country and sometimes even the world. He doesn’t spend much time here, so he decided it would be best if I stayed here for a while and kept an eye on the place. Houses are meant to be lived in.”

“A priest?” What kind of priest travels all over? What sort of services do priests provide that could be in such high demand?

“He specializes in exorcisms, although most of the cases he sees are normal illnesses and human influences. People need him to put in an appearance though, and sometimes just the presence of a holy man helps.” Allen’s voice is idle and straightforward, as if explaining that his uncle is a dentist or an accountant.

“Do you really believe that? It doesn’t sound real.”

Allen shrugs his good shoulder. “I’ve seen stranger things than the devil.”

The inevitable encroachment of the tide drives them back inside, the water eating away at dry sand. The ocean is still too cold for Lavi. It may always be too cold for him, he suspects.

“The back of your neck burned,” Allen observes while they make dinner in the setting sunlight. The red cast to the clouds and light lends his skin, hair, and clothes more color than usual, so much that he nearly glows with it. All the light does for Lavi is burn his skin and eyes, until he’s permanently flushed.

“It doesn’t hurt too bad.” Without the sun, evenings and nights are cold here, even with the heat the stones around the beach retain. The wool of Lavi’s sweater itches against his burned skin but it’s a pleasant reminder of the day.

Dinner is a quiet affair. Timcampy sleeps next to Allen’s seat, his nose tucked into the thick golden fur of his tail. When Lavi first asked what kind of dog he was, Allen just shrugged and said “yellow.” Tim ostensibly belongs to the mysterious priest uncle as well, but he is completely devoted to Allen.

Every night, Allen walks home alone through the dark. Lavi’s not one for superstition or fairy tales, but he worries about Allen and his one eye walking about in the woods with only the light of the heavenly bodies to guide him, black trees on his left and the wickedly cold salt sea on his right. Tim always walks ahead though, showing the way between the trees and keeping away from the clinging grasp of seaweed.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to walk you home, Allen?”

“I know these woods and this shore better than you, you know. You’ve not even been here two weeks.”

Those two weeks feel like a hundred years. Time doesn’t matter as much, here in the green and the calm. Days have no names, hours bleed into each other. Tides are the best way of marking time, washing over the sand and shells and stones and long-shattered glass. This island could be a home. He could nestle away in the sun-warmed pine needles and be safe and healed, away from the city and his life, in this unreality and honeyed light. It is a tempting thought, to let the summer unwind before him like a sphere of twine until he is old and gnarled and gray as the scaly trees with their roots near the sand. It is a dream. He would not wish to wake.


End file.
